Hogwarts, A History
by Lindsey Grissom
Summary: No one's surprised when she's sorted into Slytherin. No one's surprised and no one expected it because no one knows her well enough to expect anything. She's normal – muggleborn – and the only reason anyone might have to recognise her name is that in her shock at seeing her first letter-delivering owl, she set her Hogwarts letter alight and had to be sent a second one.


**A/N: Oh guys, I've missed you all so much! And these two adorable old boobies. Work got...it got complicated and busy and real life got messy with it for a bit, but in an effort to return to publishing Stubborn Love, I've been doing some other writing exercises and amongst other things, this came from that. Thank you all so much for your messages and reviews! I've been so lax at getting back to any of you, but I really have appreciated each and every one of them and please don't worry, I have NO intention of leaving SL unfinished. In fact later today I have the prologue to SL to publish here. Anyway, please enjoy this odd little peice. **

_In which Elsie Hughes is a Slytherin and her life sort of spirals out from there._

* * *

**Hogwarts, A History**

**i.**

No one's surprised when she's sorted into Slytherin. No one's surprised and no one expected it because no one knows her well enough – or at all – to expect anything.

She's normal – muggleborn – the first in her family to have magic and the only reason anyone might have to recognise her name is that in her shock at seeing her first letter-delivering owl, she set her Hogwarts letter alight and had to be sent a second one.

But a lot of children were sent second letters this year, so even that doesn't make her stand out after all.

She sits at the end of the Slytherin table and tries not to listen to how quiet the hall gets when someone else is sorted into the seat beside her, how loud it gets when the others are sorted anywhere else.

She doesn't understand what the Houses mean; they seem like fantastical made up words and maybe Slytherin sounds like a snake, but what on Earth is a Hufflepuff?

By the time the Headmaster has finished his speech and the funny hat has sung its song, she's one of three new Slytherins in a year group of thirty and she can feel at least four pairs of eyes on her back every minute.

She's never seen so much food in her life and she has to stop herself from gathering rolls and slices of beef in napkins and hiding them in her pocket to send home later.

Ma told her to enjoy herself, to not worry about her and Pa and Becky, but the boy next to her has left more meat on his chicken bone than they usually have to make soup with and he's already reaching for another drumstick. It's hard not to worry, but at least Ma has one less mouth to feed now.

She doesn't fill her plate with cakes when the meat and potatoes disappear and the sweets shimmer onto the middle of the table. She does reach for a single shortbread biscuit and wrap it up for later. Pa always sneaks her a biscuit before bed and she plans to keep up the tradition if she can, even if he's not here with her.

By the time she's sat down in the Slytherin common room to write a letter home before bed, she has a better idea of the Houses and what it means that she's been sorted here.

She got shoved on her way down to the dungeons by someone in a red and gold striped tie and instead of saying sorry he called her evil.

She gets it, they don't want anyone to be Slytherin and it just makes her happier that she is. She never has been good at doing what people want her to.

She finds someone to ask about a post box and the blonde girl sneers before telling her she's an idiot and the owlery is at the top of the castle.

As she makes her way up the winding stairs, following the unfamiliar hooting of a hundred birds, she realises she's just outed herself as something different, something unpopular in her own house.

She's not too worried, she'd noticed the expensive clothes and the happy settled looks of people who have never had to worry if they'll have enough money for food next week, if they buy an extra loaf of bread today. Even if she had wanted to, she wouldn't have been able to hide for long anyway. Not here.

A week later she learns that it isn't that she's _poor_ – although that's hardly a point in her favour – it's that she's not Pureblood in a House that has very specific opinions on purity.

_Mudblood_, she thinks with a little bit of pride, pointing her wand at the neck of the Fifth-Year at her feet in the corridor outside the History of Magic class and telling him she'll do a lot worse next time if he touches her again.

**-x-x-x-**

**ii.**

She goes home by horseless carriage at the end of the year, the same way she came to Hogwarts in September. They couldn't afford to send her to London and she hadn't cared because it made no sense at all to travel all that way just to sit on a steam train and come all the way back to Scotland, when their farm is only a few villages away from Hogsmead.

She doesn't think she's missing much, even if Sarah O'Brien sneered at her all year every time someone brought up the Hogwarts Express. O'Brien would have found something else to sneer at her about anyway and at least this isn't something she'd have to pretend not to care about.

Her first year is over and her head is full of new spells – they're all new, it's not like she knew any before coming to Hogwarts, not like most of her class and all of her housemates – and weird words.

It's the first time she's been back home since the start of the year and she can't wait to tell Becky everything, even the things she's been writing in her letters every week.

She won't tell her Ma and Pa that she's been sent to the Headmaster's office so many times that she's known every single one of his passwords and he's started leaving out a bowl of rhubarb and custard hard sweets on his desk because they're her favourite.

She won't tell them that, but she imagines they probably already know. But she's doing well in her classes and the Headmaster doesn't ever do more than make her tea and feed her sweets when she's sent to him, so she's concluded that he's on her side anyway, even if the other Gryffindor Professors aren't – and there's a lot of them in the school, although the librarian was a Ravenclaw and the History teacher a Hufflepuff and a ghost. They don't talk about where the Slytherin students go after graduation, because they don't come back to Hogwarts to teach and even the Ministry isn't accepting them now that the war's started – and that's really all that matters. She's sure Ma and Pa will see that too.

Her bag is heavy with clothes and books and the food she snuck out of breakfast this morning, but she still carries it to the carriage herself and settles in with it on the seat beside her.

She sees the other students saying goodbye to each other even as they head off together to the station and O'Brien looks over at her from where she's smiling at Cora Levinson and she looks back because that's as close as they'll get to a friendly goodbye when they're not friendly at all really.

There are eyes on her again, Gryffindor eyes that neither glare nor spark and she catches Carson staring at her from the corner of her eye as her carriage starts moving.

He's always staring at her, frowning usually and she's not sure what she ever did to annoy the Third-Year boy when the other Hufflepuffs don't seem to mind her at all.

She leans back against the seat and pulls out her potions book and smiles even as she reads over notes she should know by now but somehow still doesn't. She's a witch, soon to be a Second-Year witch and a Scottish Mudblood survived a year in Slytherin House.

If she could tell Becky what that actually means, she thinks her sister might be rather proud of her for that.

**-x-x-x-**

**iii.**

She gets through the rest of her time at Hogwarts the way she got through her first year; she reads and studies and when someone thinks they can push her around or pick on her younger housemates, she curses up a storm – literally once; the third floor corridor was shut down for weeks while the Professors tried to diffuse the hurricane and she got half a month's worth of detentions, thirty points taken from her House and fifty added back on from the Defence teacher who said she showed flair.

She makes allies in her House and some from the others because Slytherins don't make _friends_ and when she heads to the library to study there's always someone sitting at the end of her table before she's done. She still knows all of the Headmaster's passwords, but she gets better at punishing people without getting into trouble. She finds that harsh words sometimes work, but other times cursing really is the only way they'll learn.

She scribbles new spells in the margins of her History books and one day in March in her third year she sends Barrow running across the Quidditch pitch with a red ear feeling like someone's pinching it between their fingers and wraps an arm around little Anna Smith and leads her back to the Ravenclaw rooms. She doesn't just defend her own House anymore, not when most of the time they're worse than everyone else.

Her fourth year is the year she finally stands in front of Charlie Carson and demands he tell her why he's always staring – still always staring even though it's been three years and next year he'll be graduating – he laughs with his friends (Grigg and Bates who she always thought was actually nice and now definitely isn't going to let Anna keep mooning over) and calls her delusional but later he sits at the end of her table and conjures a rose out of the discarded scraps of parchment she's dropped on the floor.

"We call you the Scottish Dragon." He says to her when he holds it out and she pinches her lips together so he won't know that she's always thought her animagus form would be a dragon and plucks the paper rose from his fingers.

"If you focus on the feel and scent of petals before you flick your wand, you'll get the transfiguration to hold properly." She tells him as the rose crackles in her hand. "Here, like this, see" and that's how she becomes his secret tutor for the next year and a half.

-x-x-x-

**iv.**

They kiss once, ducked down in the stacks and his hand finds a space to balance by her head between _'Famous Familiars'_ and _'Fantastical Beasts'_. He has the other curled into the warm place between her jumper and shirt and it's only when he slips and knocks a cloud of dust in her face that they pull apart coughing.

"I'm running away." He says when they're back at their table and she's trying not to think about how he tasted like peppermint and grass – every flavour beans are a favourite of his. "Me and Grigg, we're going to London to sing."

She thinks he's an idiot to throw away the last few months of school, a blind fool if he thinks Grigg isn't so much _less_ than Charles is.

She tells him so, gathering up her books and quills, biting the inside of her cheeks raw so she won't say other things about how she wants him to stay and she'd been hoping he might take her to the Seventh-Year ball. She says she won't bother tutoring him the rest of the week if he's just going to waste all her hard work next Thursday anyway and when he tells her it's never been a waste, she tries very hard not to believe him.

For the next few months he sends her postcards by owl, silly little static images that remind her of home and how she's never going to only be a witch.

The Headmaster is furious and she gets herself into trouble just so she can sit at his desk and drink tea and eat rhubarb and custard sweets and be as angry as the Professor that her friend ran away and hope he might tell her that he's found Charles and he's bringing him back.

The Goblet Of Fire comes to Hogwarts in her sixth year and she watches terrified as Robert Crawley fights for honour for Slytherin – his life as well it seems – and Cora Levinson's affection. He fails pretty spectacularly at both and she snickers into her oatmeal when Cora turns him down again and he trips over his own feet walking away.

She feels bad afterwards, until she sees them sneaking out of the Room of Requirement one night while she's patrolling the halls – she's not a prefect but she still likes to look out for the younger years – and Cora's clutching a bunch of shimmering red roses.

She doesn't think of Charles often, not since the postcards stopped arriving, but that night she pulls out the little box of his letters and cards and stares at the paper rose pressed flat between them. It still smells like ink and parchment and for one night she lets herself wonder where he is.

Her seventh year is swallowed up with essays and exams and sometimes she feels like she never leaves the library. She dreams she's being chased by a giant red cross and more often than not she wakes up with parchment stuck to her cheek and her quill cramped up in her hand.

Seventh year is the year Grindleward's army really starts recruiting and secretly she thinks they must be getting desperate if they're trying this hard to sway the favour of _children_. She's scared for her housemates and terrified for her classmates and she imagines fifty different ways they'll come for her in the night because she's the black spot on Slytherin's pristine roster.

They do come for her but they want to recruit her not kill her and honestly by the time she's clenching her fingers tightly behind her back in the Headmaster's office, she's not sure it's not exactly the same thing anyway.

No one refuses Grindleward, but she does. She plays up her muggleness to an extreme she never has before and because the Slytherin dungeons become unsafe for her, she spends one night in the Infirmary with her wand gripped tight in her hand beneath her pillow.

She only has one more month of Hogwarts to survive and she'll be damned if she'll let them push her out of her House now. So as soon as the cuts on her face have been healed, she goes back to the dungeons and dares them to come at her when she's awake and ready.

Slytherin is sometimes known as the House of Cowards so after she sends Barrow away with a broken nose and his teeth slowly turning to coal one by one, she's not surprised that they leave her alone.

She graduates Hogwarts as a qualified witch but she has a target on her back and she doesn't let her family come to cheer her on.

-x-x-x-

**v.**

They come for her while she's caught up at the Ministry. Tied up in red tape and applications that have to be completed in triplicate.

It's brash and idiotic to attack in broad daylight, but that they're caught easily doesn't give her much satisfaction when she's paying out for side-by-side headstones and sweet, magicless Becky has lost her mind – she hasn't lost it, it was stolen from her, taken piece by piece with every _crucio_ spat at her.

She does what she can for the effort after that, but it's less than she'd like when she has a sister to care for that's regressed back to infancy.

Still, she creates spell after curse after almost-unforgivable and manages to reverse a few of the worst the other side have to offer and then eventually Professor Dumbledore kills his friend and like that, it's over.

She goes to as many funerals as she can, holds hands and hugs women and men she used to stand in front of in the halls. She's called as a character witness for and against people she used to sleep in beds next to and once that's all over and Azkaban is full to the brim, she takes Becky back to the farm and lets herself quietly worry about Charles again.

-x-x-x-

**vi.**

"Becky will love it there."

"That's not the issue." She tells him, because it's not. Of course Becky will love it at Hogwarts – despite everything her sister still adores magic and the only time she's used her own these last few years is when she wants to make Becky smile – and since that night there's enough magic left inside Becky from the curses that she's very nearly a Squib, so she'll be able to see it all the way a witch would.

It's not the first time they've asked her to come back to Hogwarts and Dumbledore is not even the first Headmaster to have done it, although she does find it easier to say no to him.

Dumbledore is much more manipulative than her Headmaster was and she's heard from others that he keeps a bowl of lemon drops on his desk no matter what the students that go to him might prefer. Lemon drops have always tasted like washing liquid to her.

Still, she hadn't predicted that the wily old coot would send Charles to do his bidding this time. They always said Dumbledore was more Slytherin than he lets on.

It's much harder to send Charles away than she'd like, even if both of them have been changed almost unrecognisably by time.

"Hogwarts needs you."

"Hogwarts can get along just fine without me." Even if they do need a new Defence Professor, even if Slytherin needs a new Head of House.

"Don't you miss it at all?"

She meets his eyes as she hands over the plate with his cheese sandwich and smokey-bacon crisps and he smiles.

He smiled like that when he showed up at her door three months after the war ended, big ridiculous eyebrows exactly how she remembered and a long cut across his forehead that hadn't quite healed and wasn't hidden well by the lock of hair flopped over the top of it.

He'd been right there on the front lines almost since he left Hogwarts, using her spells and hiding in plain sight. Their secret weapon and she'd shouted and wandlessly set his tie alight and told him to get off her farm and never come back.

Ten minutes later she was handing him a cup of tea and biting her lip to stop herself from crying at the sight of him in her parlour.

She sighs. "Tell Dumbledore we'll be there in the last week of August and not a day earlier. I need to find someone to look after the farm."

-x-x-x-

**vii.**

Sarah O'Brien is the school nurse and if _that _doesn't say everything about the state of the wizarding world since the war.

She finds herself standing in the Infirmary only half as often as she finds herself waiting for her students outside the Headmaster's office.

Crawley children are starting to fill up her House again and she refuses to think about how old that makes her feel, because children of Robert and Cora Crawley should not be old enough for Hogwarts.

The Houses still fight and the Welcome Feast still feels like such a wasteful extravagance to her, but she catches Charles's eye from his seat next to the Headmaster and he tucks two shortbread biscuits away in a napkin for them to share when they retire to their room tonight.

Dumbledore claps his hands and the last of the plates disappear and she stands with the other teachers and heads down to her Slytherins – five new ones this year, shaking from a combination of nerves and sugar – while Charles heads for the Hufflepuffs.

"Now then children, if you'll follow me down to the dungeons. As the Headmaster said, I'm Professor Hughes-Carson and the Head of Slytherin House."

**_End._**


End file.
